This body of work grew out of a commission by a Brooklyn-based theater company, White Bird Productions. Five different playwrights were asked to adapt one Grimm\u2019s fairytale each\u2014to modern day Brooklyn\u2014to be presented as an evening of family theater. I stumbled a bit before hitting the appropriate note: like many, I am a fairy tale aficionado, but my attraction is to the darker themes. I came up with a Hansel and Gretel that was more Fassbinder than anything children would want to watch. There was Cinderella, the crack glass pipe and the reunion with the Prince in rehab. Scrapped that one\u2014plus she\u2019s French. Bluebeard as the after school voice teacher, (Professor Mesmer to you) in his own Havishamy gloom\u2014too harrowingly adult\u2026
\nFinally I came up with Snow White, set in Coney Island. A teenage boy walks into Grimm\u2019s Candy and Curiousities on the boardwalk. An aging, but amazingly sprightly Herr Grimm attempts to interest the lad with candy dwarf confections, movie star posters (Marlene Dietrich), and other distractions, but is met with head on indifference\u2014the boy is only interested on the numbers tattooed on Herr Grimm\u2019s wrist: a story of which origins he discovers in a dark dream after a blow to the head\u2026<\/p>\n
Several more tales grew out of my efforts, all fairytale based, all reset in environments other than Once Upon a Time\u2014where the metamorphoses of bodies into gold, geese, gingerbread all delight and enchant. Translated into our realm, these transformations are violent. The next time you look into that pit of horror: war crimes, inquisitions, holocausts, massacres, pogroms\u2014man being wolf to man\u2014 look also to ancient myth and the realm of fable: where all dismemberments and extractions are fluid, magic and sanctioned. The appetite for inhumanity always seems incredulous, but we needn\u2019t look further than our own backyard treasure trove of myths and fairytales to find that we are hotwired for extreme behavior. Just apply pressure and\u2026<\/p>\n
The body of the fable is prone to violence and miracles in the same token.<\/p>\n
The choice to reset these tales in Weimar is not an attempt to point fingers. I am more interested in how cultures act out their body of myths. Weimar itself is good launching pad for this: the early idealism, the head rush of between the wars decadence\u2026 Snow White has been updated to Herr Jakob\u2019s Golem; Hansel and Gretel live in postwar isolation; Rumpelstiltskin has morphed into Goldfinger at the Casino Royale\u2026 Sleeping Beauty which might be considered a French export (it\u2019s a Perrault), was actually translated by the Brothers\u2019 Grimm as Dornr\u00f6schen. My translation is called Surge. Resurgence (The Princess and The Pea) is a nod to the Russian Revolution via Shostakovich\u2019s Gamayun song cycle: A mythical bird predicts the bloody end of the powers that be\u2026<\/p>\n
True archetypes never wear themselves thin: not even fashionably.<\/p>\n
Onome Ekeh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This body of work grew out of a commission by a Brooklyn-based theater company, White Bird Productions. Five different playwrights were asked to adapt one Grimm\u2019s fairytale each\u2014to modern day Brooklyn\u2014to be presented as an evening of family theater. I stumbled a bit before hitting the appropriate note: like many, I am a fairy tale aficionado, but my attraction is to the darker themes. I came up with a Hansel and Gretel that was more Fassbinder than anything children would want to watch. There was Cinderella, the crack glass pipe and the reunion with the Prince in rehab. Scrapped that one\u2014plus she\u2019s French. Bluebeard as the after school voice teacher, (Professor Mesmer to you) in his own Havishamy gloom\u2014too harrowingly adult\u2026 Finally I came up with Snow White, set in Coney Island. A teenage boy walks into Grimm\u2019s Candy and Curiousities on the boardwalk. An aging, but amazingly sprightly Herr Grimm attempts to interest the lad with candy dwarf confections, movie star posters (Marlene Dietrich), and other distractions, but is met with head on indifference\u2014the boy is only interested on the numbers tattooed on Herr Grimm\u2019s wrist: a story of which origins he discovers in a dark dream after a blow to the head\u2026 Several more tales grew out of my efforts, all fairytale based, all reset in environments other than Once Upon a Time\u2014where the metamorphoses of bodies into gold, geese, gingerbread all delight and enchant. Translated into our realm, these transformations are violent. The next time you look into that pit of horror: war crimes, inquisitions, holocausts, massacres, pogroms\u2014man being wolf to man\u2014 look also to ancient myth and the realm of fable: where all dismemberments and extractions are fluid, magic and sanctioned. The appetite for inhumanity always seems incredulous, but we needn\u2019t look further than our own backyard treasure trove of myths and fairytales to find that we are hotwired for extreme behavior. Just apply pressure and\u2026 The body of the fable is prone to violence and miracles in the same token. The choice to reset these tales in Weimar is not an attempt to point fingers. I am more interested in how cultures act out their body of myths. Weimar itself is good launching pad for this: the early idealism, the head rush of between the wars decadence\u2026 Snow White has been updated to Herr Jakob\u2019s Golem; Hansel and Gretel live in postwar isolation; Rumpelstiltskin has morphed into Goldfinger at the Casino Royale\u2026 Sleeping Beauty which might be considered a French export (it\u2019s a Perrault), was actually translated by the Brothers\u2019 Grimm as Dornr\u00f6schen. My translation is called Surge. Resurgence (The Princess and The Pea) is a nod to the Russian Revolution via Shostakovich\u2019s Gamayun song cycle: A mythical bird predicts the bloody end of the powers that be\u2026 True archetypes never wear themselves thin: not even fashionably. Onome Ekeh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16],"tags":[17,18],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-foreword","category-theater","tag-drama","tag-grimms-weimar-republic"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3638,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/3638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thememorexe.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}